Atlassian JIRA and Limited User Accounts on Windows 7

I’m doing a bit of mucking around with Atlassian JIRA on a local system, using a 30-day trial license. One thing I noticed on Windows systems is that the general assumption that you’re running as an Administrator all of the time is still being followed. It’s kind of a pain.

For instance, when you go about installing the Atlassian Plugin SDK, it will set all of the necessary environment variables on the installing user’s account only, but the installer requires you to elevate privileges via the User Account Control before it runs. It even attempts to install the files in the Administrator user’s home folder, meaning no one else would even be able to get close to these files.

I created a neutral folder under C:\Atlassian and installed there instead.

Here are the environment variables it sets on the Administrator account only, which you need to add to your usual Limited User Account, so that the rest of their command-line examples will work properly:

ATLAS_HOME
C:\Atlassian\atlassian-plugin-sdk

JAVA_HOME
C:/Program Files/Java/jdk1.7.0_51

M2_REPO
C:\Users\Admin\.m2\repository

Path (spelled oddly, it should be PATH, but cmd.exe doesn't seem to mind)
%JAVA_HOME%\bin;C:\Atlassian\atlassian-plugin-sdk\bin

The M2_REPO environment variable is pretty important because it defines where all your Maven dependencies will be cached.

Once the environment variables are set via the Control Panel, running atlas-version should work fine:

C:\Users\Limited>atlas-version

ATLAS Version:    4.2.20
ATLAS Home:       C:\Atlassian\atlassian-plugin-sdk
ATLAS Scripts:    C:\Atlassian\atlassian-plugin-sdk\bin
ATLAS Maven Home: C:\Atlassian\atlassian-plugin-sdk\apache-maven
--------
Executing: "C:\Atlassian\atlassian-plugin-sdk\apache-maven\bin\mvn.bat" --version -gs C:\Atlassian\atlassian-plugin-sdk\apache-maven/conf/settings.xml

Apache Maven 2.1.0 (r755702; 2009-03-18 20:10:27+0100)
Java version: 1.7.0_51
Java home: C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.7.0_51\jre
Default locale: en_US, platform encoding: Cp1252
OS name: "windows 7" version: "6.1" arch: "amd64" Family: "windows"

Sadly, it’s not a typo, a four year-old version of Maven is really being used here.